For want of a better title…

I was paying last month’s cellphone bill this week and found a charge I didn’t recognize on Simon’s phone. He’s 11, and shouldn’t be incurring extra charges. He did have a couple of games that Vicki told him he could download, but this wasn’t one of them.

AT&T couldn’t tell me anything about the charge. That seems odd; they apparently have the right to put something on my bill without giving me any justification. The operator did tell me how to find out who’d originated it (”google SJA Mobile”). So I did, and found SJA Mobile’s website. Interestingly absent is any useful information, like what they do, or what I could be paying for. Though they do offer a “no questions asked” refund.

Googling further becomes more interesting. There are dozens of blogs that claim that SJA Mobile provides a useful service, but none of them say what it is. Paid advertising? Dunno, it seems to me that without identifying the service you’re not going to sell much. Yet, for the same reason, they’re unlikely to be unsolicited testimonials.

The only site I found that gave me anything of interest was Skydeck’s blog, here and here. The text and comments make it pretty clear that SJA Mobile is or is involved in scamming. SJA initiated billing the blog writer after sending him the text message ”… “, with no action on his part. It seems that SJA Mobile is perpetrating cramming.

In my case, though, there was a reason behind the cramming. I was reluctant to follow SJA Mobile’s procedure to get my “no questions asked” refund, because I felt it would be implicitly legitimizing their charge. On the other hand, I didn’t really want to ask AT&T to remove the charge as disputed, when there was any possibility that it might be legitimate. So I did follow the SJA procedure, requested a refund, and texted STOP to the SJA number.

In response to the STOP, I got a text message from “ultimate-game-cheats.net” saying I was unsubscribed. I asked Simon, and he said yes, he’d given them his cell number to get help with a computer game. (Aside: never use a paid service for a computer game when GameFaqs.org has everything you’d ever need.) He said he’d been unable to get off the list, and didn’t know that it was costing us money.

Ultimate-game-cheats is not obfuscating the fact that signing up is $10/month. Not much, anyway. Certainly the “enter your cell # for the site password” is in much bigger and brighter text than the fine print, but the fine print is quite readable, It even mentions the subscription fee in two places.

Does that make the site and the charges legitimate? Well, that’s the reason I’m posting this. I don’t think so, and I think there’s a nasty near-scam going on here, abetted by AT&T and the other carriers who allow SJA Mobile billing rights.

I readily acknowledge that the charge was initiated by Simon’s providing the cell #, even though the site says that there will be a recurring $9.99 charge, that you must be 14 years or older, and that you must have your parents’ permission.

However, the company (ultimate-game-cheats) takes no steps to verify age. Yeah, it’s not an easy thing to do, but here it’s non-existent. Some sites (”adult” sites) require credit cards partly as an age verification mechanism. A cell # doesn’t even begin to imply adulthood or financial responsibility. Plenty of kids have cellphones. I’m fairly sure that a Texas court wouldn’t hold that an 11-year-old kid clicking on a link (even one that says don’t click unless you’re 14) would satisfy the legal requirement for establishing a contract.

I see no indication on the page that this is a real service. I see nowhere to enter the password that the company claims it will send. Perhaps the text message includes other access instructions - or perhaps it is entirely a scam.

Even if not, the site targets kids, encourages them to sign up, committing their parents to paying. If this isn’t exactly a scam, it’s at least misleading.

SJA Mobile has a duty to ensure that the charges that they bill to AT&T on behalf of Ultimate-game-cheats is legitimate. Clearly they do not do that.

AT&T apparently is willing to charge a customer based on zero justification for the charge from SJA Mobile. I’m sure that their contact with SJA Mobile requires that SJA authenticates its charges, but I’m not a party to that agreement, SJA doesn’t authenticate, and AT&T doesn’t police. So I’m left financially responsible for a specious charge.

Two aspects of this system particularly disturb me. First, that I don’t have a way to opt out. AT&T has no provision for me to say “don’t add third-party charges to my bill.” They’re free to add whatever they want, and I have to either pay or challenge it. My cell # has been turned into a payment ID, like a credit card, but unlike a credit card, I can’t cut it up and throw it away. I’m part of a new monetary system that I didn’t sign up for, and don’t want.

The second is a corollary to the first. Since a cell # has become a source of credit funding, any kid with a cell phone now has access to their parents’ funds. Subject to reading the bill’s details (how many parents know to do that? Or are likely to wade through every line? My bill was twelve pages) parents could well be funding all kinds of illicit activities. Possibly canceling text messaging would solve the problem - if the end provider was responsible enough to require receipt of a text message. (The “…” text would argue against that always being the case.) But texting is a given for kids these days.

Until the phone companies install a rational opt-in system for third-party charges, I have no option but to scrutinize and challenge every bill, and to warn others to do the same. Maybe I’m becoming increasingly a Luddite, but this is a payment system that I don’t want to be a part of.

Update:

The link to ultimate-game-cheats.net has changed today. Instead of the signup page that was present two days ago, there’s a page that says “new registrations are temporarily unavailable due to routine maintenance.” There is a login page, with a password, which does imply that the game cheats service may be real.

After abandoning Graffiti 1, I’ve been using TealScript exclusively, and I have to say that I’m very happy with it. I haven’t spent my $30 yet, I’m still using introductory trial, but I certainly will be. It recognizes my Graffiti 1 letter construction better than the Graffiti 1 libraries (and better than my earlier Palm devices ever did). I haven’t even attempted to tune the character recognition.

It seems not to introduce any extra instability. (Saying that any particular package is stable on a LifeDrive really isn’t possible, given the instability of the device itself, but TealScript appears to be stable.) It has excellent documentation, and it seems that it has good support.

So I can finally get back to doing something useful with my LifeDrive - beyond playing Sudoku and watching videos.

Though I now have Graffiti 1, I’ve now run into the problem mentioned in the thread I linked. When I exceed the size of a text box in the Blazer browser, the device resets.

Sigh.

I can’t go back to Graffiti 2. I’ve read several comments to the effect that “if you practice, you can make it work.” Well, I’ve practiced for a year, and it doesn’t work.

Next step: replace the buggy Palm browser with an alternative. The only one I’ve found so far is Opera Mini. Now, I like Opera, but Opera Mini requires Java, which is another layer of complexity and likely source of reliability problems.

We’ll see.

Update: BOOM. Device reset. As soon as I tried to browse to Google. So I went back to a page I’d encountered that mentioned JVM settings, tweaked them accordingly, and… guess what? BOOM.

I am hating this device more every moment.

Update again: Plan C is TealScript, from TealPoint Software. The demo version recognizes my Graffiti 1-style writing better than the old Palm. Plus it can learn my writing style (well, so they claim. Personally I don’t think anything could ever learn my writing style) and can use the entire screen for accurate character entry. It looks like it’s exactly what I need. Costs $30 for something that ought still to be part of the device, but I stopped expecting Palm software to be free or reliable a long time ago.

I’ve owned various versions of the Palm Pilot for many years. I think my first was a Palm III, which I upgraded at least once before buying a Palm IIIc (the color version). I still have notes from Pooks’s class that I took in 1999 or 2000 that has moved from one device to the next.

I don’t really know why I didn’t replace the IIIc when it finally fell apart, but last year I decided it was time to upgrade to a LifeDrive. It has 4 gigabytes internal storage, enough for several compressed video files, a large viewing area for watching those videos, WiFi, and all of the old Palm software. What could be wrong with that?

Reliability, for one thing. It crashes regularly, usually when using WiFi. The WiFi doesn’t recognize range extenders, so it’s unreliable around the house; either the signal is too weak (since its range is poor anyway) or it keeps switching between the router or the extender.

The 3.5mm audio jack seems very fragile. You can feel that a regular plug doesn’t fit well. Mine collapsed on me, and I called Palm to have it repaired. This was slightly under a year, and they agreed to repair it under warranty, which I was very pleased about; with mechanical damage I thought I’d have to pay for the repair.

Before I sent the LifeDrive to the repair office, I tried to do a full reset to wipe all of my personal data. Something happened, and it locked up completely. Black screen, wouldn’t power up. Reset button inoperative and hard reset failed. Still, I sent it back for the jack repair, and Palm sent me a replacement. They will repair or replace at their option, which is fine by me. All of my data is hotsynced.

I synced the new unit and it worked fine - for a few hours. Then black screen, no possibility of reset. I called the repair center, and they gave me a new return number.

The repair center is excellent. They’ve been very fast, very helpful, they’ve given me useful advice and have never tried to lay blame on me. The call center is in India, of course…

So the second replacement device arrived, and it ran overnight and then died in exactly the same way. Clearly there’s something wrong in software. Something I’ve done has caused the device to lock up. But a hard reset should never be dependent on current data. Obviously it isn’t really a hard reset.

This time when I called the service center I explained the issue before sending it back. The helpful operator showed me how to move all of my program data out so it wouldn’t be hotsynced. Then I’d be able to reinstall all of my programs and hope that I don’t get back into the same situation. Of course, if I do, I’m screwed… The operator also gave me an account number so that this time the repair cost me nothing at all, not even shipping.

So I have unit #4. It’s been working for a couple of weeks now. I’m adding all of my third-party programs; the only one I haven’t installed yet that I need is Sudoku, and I had that for a long time on #1, so it won’t cause me any problems. I think it’s most likely Filez and some changes I’d used it for. I won’t touch that this time around.

Reliability is why I will never buy another Palm. That isn’t the reason I hate it, though.

That reason is this: Graffiti II sucks.

Graffiti, the writing system for the original Palm, was quirky, but effective. To create some letters you had to use a highly stylized representation. To make a K, you draw an alpha. A T is a square 7. But once you’d gotten into the habit, it was very easy to create accurate text.

Graffiti was dropped because of a patent suit brought by Xerox. At this point, it seems that Palm is ahead in the appeals process, but in the meantime, they’ve dropped Graffiti and replaced it with Graffiti II, based on Jot.

Graffiti II is close to worthless. The two-stroke method is horribly unreliable. T especially is impossible to render accurately. T consists of a vertical stroke, top to bottom, followed by a horizontal stroke, left to right. I have tried and failed to create a T more than 10 times in a row on more than one occasion. I can see the lines on the screen, crossing correctly, but the T won’t appear. It will either be a space or an L followed by a space.

Even when it works, the method of constructing a T causes problems. You can’t end a word with L followed by space. You have to wait for the L to appear so that the two strokes don’t combine to form a T. Or you can ensure that the two strokes are in two separate parts of the tiny writing window, which is hard to do (except when you’re trying to create a T, it seems).

I is a line and a dot, so it usually appears as L. @ is an @, and it usually takes me 4-5 times to get it not to be an o.

With Graffiti I I would occasionally make errors, but I could tell what I was writing and fix the notes later. Graffiti II was so bad that it was worthless for taking notes in real-time.

So a few days ago, after some Googling, I found this link which told me how to “downgrade” to Graffiti I. I’ve done it, and - wheee! I can’t say I love the device, because it’s still unreliable, but after owning it for a year I can finally use it. And for now, that’s good enough.

The con was worthwhile. I brought home a couple of useful pieces of knowledge.

• Always read a story aloud; to someone else if possible, but to yourself if not. You can hear clunky phrases more clearly. If you stumble over a sentence it might be awkwardly written, and if you run out of breath, it’s too long.

I discovered when I did this that it’s also good for focusing on details like inconsistent spacing and word / sound repetition, so it helped me make a few last-minute tweaks to the story.

• To succeed as a Speculative Fiction writer (according to Selina Rosen, and backed up by the rest of the panel) you need to be an extroverted self-promoter, visiting all the cons and selling yourself.

That’s a Bad Thing for me. I’ll never be able to speak in front of others, and I’ll never be an extrovert.

That isn’t going to stop me submitting the story, though. It should start on its rounds tomorrow. (Update: nope, it’s in the mail today.)

One question that came up several times was “How do I find a beta reader?” A beta reader being someone who’ll read and critique a piece before you send it out. I get great feedback from the critique group, but it strikes me it might be interesting to create a session on how to be a beta reader, and introduce con-goers to each other so that they can trade readings. I wouldn’t mind additional independent help on a story, and would like the chance to offer feedback. I’ll have to suggest that to the con folks for next year.

Pooks: no filk.

… Con DFW

Pooks made a comment here about my reaction to my short story, and used it to ask whether other writers suffered.

My initial reaction was “that isn’t suffering,” and I haven’t changed my mind, but after thinking it over for a while, I can see why she’d the question that way. Making the reader suffer is something we try to do all the time. Whether it’s suffering from a sad ending, or from edge-of-the-seat tension, or terror, a good book can make a reader suffer - in a sense.

That’s not what I’d consider suffering, though. So my answer is still no. Suffering would mean to be persecuted for their work, like Solzhenitsyn or Rushdie. Or to be so obsessed with the creative process that your life suffers. (I’m obsessive, but not to that extent.)

In the sense of “make the reader (/ viewer / whatever) suffer,” obviously, there are some great books and movies that do that. I doubt I’ll ever be able to watch “Paris, Texas” again. (Of all the emotionally-wrenching movies I’ve seen, that’s the one that always comes to mind.) The movie makes you identify with the protagonist, and you certainly feel the protagonist’s suffering, which is a deeply disturbing and upsetting experience. I just wouldn’t consider my own reaction to it as suffering.

And that is very similar to how I feel about my own characters. When I realized how much potential suffering the one change I made would cause my protagonist, it did upset me - in exactly the same way that it would upset me had I experienced this in someone else’s fiction. I certainly wouldn’t refrain from making the change because of it - quite the contrary. I’m always happy to make change that sadden me, because I think it has the potential to improve the story.

This particular change doesn’t even guarantee that things will be as bleak as I imagine, and that’s better still, since ambiguity is (almost) always good.

Having said all that - there’s a problem with identifying with my characters so closely. I can tell when making them suffer is an improvement, but I can’t know whether the story is as good as it seems to me. I’m sure that no-one is going to find the story has as much meaning to them as it does to me, because I’ve lived the idea for so long. It might be that if you can be more dispassionate about your characters, you can get a better feel for the overall success of the story.

(We decided - in her presence - that Pooks must be a sociopath for the way she can remain cool while tormenting her creations.)

Still, whether or not there are benefits to a dispassionate view, I’ll take my way of doing things. Then I know that a) at least one person gets to enjoy my writing, and b) the act of creating a story is at least as worthwhile as the act of reading someone else’s.

Actually, I say movies and books don’t make me suffer. That’s not really true - I have watched Battlefield Earth. If I ever find myself creating something of the caliber of that dismal piece of garbage, I hope that I will be able to do the honorable thing.

I’m sure this is already all over the net, but each time I re-watch it, I aggravate my cough by laughing.

Apple ad targeting Vista.

So I’m finally going to write a fairly personal entry here, because it’s relevant.

This last weekend has been tough, and in a way it isn’t over.

We returned from a couple of years in Seattle in 1987. My wife, Vicki, had been in a car wreck while up there, and was still in constant pain, having trouble thinking and driving. One day in late ‘87, she backed into the garage door and made a hole.

Into that gap, in the depths of winter, stole a tiny tabby cat. She’d probably been living in the relative warmth for quite some time when we discovered her, and of course we couldn’t turn her out then. So she became Mokey, a character from Jim Henson’s Fraggle Rock - still one of my favorite series, and my all-time favorite children’s show. (Nothing else Jim Henson did - as brilliant as it was - came close to Fraggle Rock, in my opinion.)

Well, as soon as we decided to keep her, and before we had chance to get her to the vet, she ran back out and got pregnant. Cats tend to do that. The result was a gorgeous mixed litter of tabbies and what were obviously siamese-mix kittens.

We gave away all but one. The kitten we kept had siamese points, tabby stripes in seal-point colors, and bright blue eyes. He liked to lie on clothes in the laundry basket, so we called him Boober, after the Fraggle who loved laundry.

He was a menace, as kittens are. In the middle of the night, he’d sneak up between Vicki and me, then reach out and stick all of his claws into my back. Several nights he’d make me wake up yelling. I’ve no idea why he singled me out for this treatment, but I’d always find it funny - after I’d calmed down from the shock.

Our house in Flower Mound had a vaulted ceiling, and a brick fireplace, with an inside brick chimney that ran all the way up - probably to twelve feet or so. One day, Boober climbed up that vertical chimney, just by clawing the bare brick. He got to higher than I could reach - we have a photo of him somewhere - and I have no recollection of how we got him down.

We had him declawed. I’ll never do that again to a cat, furniture notwithstanding, and I’ve always wished I had made that decision before we did it to Boober, because his claws were such a central part of his life.

After neutering, he got fat. He was never a huge cat, maybe fourteen pounds, but the pudgy flaps in front of his back legs would sway as he walked. So we called him “blubber” and plenty of other variants.

One day - we were living in Richardson at the time, so he’d probably have been about five - he followed Vicki out into the front yard. (We always keep our cats indoors, which is why we’d had him declawed.) There was a hawk on a telegraph pole.

Boober saw the hawk catch a squirrel, and was terrified. He slunk back into the house and hid.

Another time, he decided to try exploring our artificial Christmas tree. It couldn’t support his weight. The stand collapsed, showering the floor with ornaments, tinsel, and a very unhappy cat. He was quite disoriented. Eventually he staggered through to the bedroom and sat on the bed, still looking very dizzy.

Our siamese, Pepper, who was always a temperamental, jealous sort, started sniffing around and yowling at him. This is the only time I’ve ever seen Boober do anything of the kind, he’s always been such a gentle cat, but you could see the look in his eyes: “I’ve had enough of this shit.” He reached out a paw and smacked Pepper hard across the face. Bam.

He also earned the label “chicken”, though with his size we’d sometimes decide he was a turkey. He was terrified of thunderstorms. If there was one in the area, he’d find a hiding spot. Sometimes he’d bury himself under the blankets on the bed, and at other times he’d find a hiding place. We don’t even know where all of his hideouts were. He’d just vanish.

So we’d try to predict thunderstorms, and be sure he was penned up in our room if we heard one coming in. That way he’d make a nice warm furry footwarmer under the blankets.

He was our storm cat.

He hasn’t been bothered by thunderstorms in a few years. Maybe he’s gotten brave, or maybe deaf or lazy. I’d suspect lazy.

Ever since Pepper died, Boober has prowled the house at night yowling. There was never any real doubt about his siamese heritage, but the yowls are as clear evidence as any. He and Pepper never seemed especially close, but he started stalking around the house, apparently looking for her, and crying like only a Siamese can.

It’s been several years since Pepper made that final trip to the vet, but he’s never quit. Sometimes he yowls because he’s out of food or water, but mostly it seems to have no cause.

And that’s especially unfortunate, because he’s been yowling so much in the last few weeks, and I just ignored it. But this time I think he had something to cry about. We finally noticed last week how little he has been eating. By the weekend he wouldn’t touch his food at all. Vicki couldn’t even tempt him with cat treats, which until only a couple of weeks ago he would gobble up.

Last week he peed on the floor in the utility room. He’s always been picky about the litter box, but this time it was clean.

So on Saturday, I took him to the vet. He has a heart problem. It sounds quite serious. The vet opened a can of food, and he ate - but since then, he only took a couple of mouthfuls on Saturday, and none since. On Sunday the vet called with the results of lab work - his kidneys are failing.

It isn’t surprising. He’s a very old cat, now. Much older than Pepper was when her kidneys gave out. But, damn, he’s been part of the family so long. Elliot hadn’t turned four when we got him, and he’d have been eight, already middle-aged, when Simon was born. I’m not ready to let him go.

In a few weeks he’d turn nineteen, but right now I doubt he’ll make it until Vicki gets back from Oklahoma on Thursday.

This is the part I hate about having pets. I know that afterwards I’ll look back and feel that it was all worthwhile, and we’ve had a great nineteen years with him, but right now - I hate it. I’m fifty, and I keep crying over one silly old mog.

It didn’t help that on Saturday, after taking Boober to the vet, I watched the end of a truly tear-jerking anime. Yes, they do exist, and no, I wasn’t expecting this to be one, or there’s no way I’d have watched it then.

And on Friday, of course, I found that twist to the story I’ve been working on that gives the potential for a tragic interpretation of events. When the story demands that your characters suffer, and it usually does, you let them suffer, but at the same time you’ve grown close to them, and their pain is upsetting.

So much so that it has been very hard to make revisions this weekend.

With those three things, but most especially the decline of our once fun-loving cat, this has been a very long and upsetting weekend, and the prospects for the rest of the week don’t look much better.

I don’t know much about the technical aspects of writing. I have a fairly good instinctive grasp of grammar - which is fortunate, because I don’t recall ever studying formal grammar at school. When it comes to defining components of a sentence, I can’t - but I rarely need correction. Thinking about it - now, for the first time, as I’m writing this - maybe I should look into a class at the community college. It couldn’t hurt. But it wouldn’t be a critical need.

I know even less about what’s needed to make a story work. When it comes to structure, and the naming of the roles of each character, I’ve got a long way to go. Mostly, I think that what works is what works, and that I can tell what’s working in my writing because I know what works in other books I read. Maybe that’s not going to be enough to get published, but I can’t be worrying about it now.

Pretty much everything I do know about writing technique either is what I’ve learned by reading, or came from an excellent teacher (hi, Pooks!).

Anyway, that’s background for the fact that I don’t really have a lot of training in the craft of writing, which leaves me, I think, open to some surprises.

Lately I’ve been spending most of my time working on a short story. One of the surprises is how radically different it is creating a short compared to writing a novel. Not that this is the first short story I’ve written, but it is the first I’ve approached so seriously after spending so much time with The Book.

Where I’m fine with rattling off a page or two for The Book, and I can tell if it’s adequate, I’m examining pretty much every word of the short story for its effect. Sometimes I’ve spent hours just trying to rewrite a single line. A few days ago a friend commented about a stodgy paragraph - it was one that had been nagging at me, too - and fixing it required me to use a word that I’d used in near proximity (”survive”), which led to me reorganizing and finally rewriting about a page. Just to fix one typo and clean up a slightly clumsy paragraph.

What’s really surprised me, though, is how little I understand what I write. Not the mechanics, but the content.

This short story began life as an idea based on another story I’ve read that I don’t think was handled as well as it could be. There was an element of tragedy in the original that the writer glossed over, I felt, and I thought that there would be an interesting story in what he’d left out.

That was then. Although I remember the source, what I’ve written has so little to do with it, that I’m not even sure what my idea was. As I was watching TV and idly musing on the possibility of writing the story, an idea came to me that made the story rewrite itself. It owes so little to its origins that, as I say, I’ve lost track of what I was thinking. The conceptual rewrite took about three seconds flat; after that, it was just a matter of finding the words.

As with a lot of science fiction, this is a story that you can only really understand in hindsight. As I was writing it, though, I wasn’t consciously trying to make it work for multiple readings, yet now that I go back to review it, I see that I’ve phrased many parts in a way that can make sense with different preconceived ideas of what story I’m telling.

So I had a tale that I liked; one where I could see everything from those first three seconds crystallized into something that I’d like to try to publish.

And then I blew it.

It was another of those deceptively simple changes. I didn’t like one phrase. I’d repeated it for emphasis, and I didn’t like what it had done, but I needed something to strengthen the idea. So I came up with something just subtly different - and suddenly realized that it has such huge implications to the earlier part of the story that I no longer am certain what’s happening. I have to make the change, because it makes for a better, more ambiguous and potentially more poignant tale, but it’s no longer the story that I’d planned. Or, at least, that is only one possible interpretation, now. Another one is quite disturbing.

Some movies, or some of the anime series I watch, have endings where there’s a strong implication that one thing happens, but the ambiguity makes it much more powerful. And there’s an ending that you want to have happened, and can believe happened, but it’s not certain. I know what I want for my protagonist from this story, but I can no longer be certain that she gets it.

And I find that completely amazing, that something so simple could have taken my writing and given it a possibility that I hadn’t remotely considered.

Likely experienced writers see effects like that all the time. I’ve definitely had the first version of The Book spin out of control before now, as characters developed themselves, but never yet have I seen such a simple and unlooked-for change have such a fascinating effect.

It remains to be seen whether the story is publishable, of course, but I’m certain that it became much more so by the change of one line.